Tag Archives: Hunger Games

While the wealthy dance and drink fine wine in a futuristic playground, working people suffer on the outskirts — hungry, heavily policed, and struggling to secure basic subsistence. Once there was the chance for revolution, but now it’s a distant memory, a discarded hope kept at bay by brutal police, aching poverty, and the separation of working people into small segregated areas afraid or unable to talk to each other in a meaningful way.

Is this Panem of The Hunger Games, or the America of 2014?

Questions of whether The Hunger Games belongs to the “left” or “right” typically inhabit the same old partisan sideshow where answers are determined in advance and politics is a matter of arguing opinions. This is not the domain of revolution, which in 2014 must be the site of unanswered questions and argumentation by action.

On November 23rd in New York City, a group of activists, organizers, and revolutionaries came together to discuss the meaning of The Hunger Games to the class struggle in America. What does the popularity of this book and movie series tell us about the popular imagination? How is it read and understood by young people about to enter the job market with little hope of success? Think ahead to what an American revolution could look like, what do we make of Katniss’s struggle against not only the unjust class society she inhabits, but the authoritarian alternative that calls itself the revolution?

Listen to activists, authors and revolutionaries John Garvey, Jasmine Gibson, Jarrod Shanahan and Yuko Tonohira in a discussion moderated by Jocelyn Cohn and sponsored by Unity and Struggle and Insurgent Notes. Special thanks to Mylo Mendez for recording the audio, and to the Brooklyn Commons for hosting.

Incarcerated Workers Take the Lead! Zine Discussion.m4a: Subversive Skype #9: Incarcerated Workers Take the Lead! Zine DiscussionHosted by Houston IWOC and Monkeywrench Books (May 2016)The I.W.O.C. (Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee) is a committee of the I.W.W (Industrial Workers of the World) that emerged following the Alabama strike in 2014. The I.W.O.C. “functions as a liaison […]

Subversive Skype - Minneapolis Rising.m4a: Subversive Skype #8: Minneapolis RisingHosted by Out of the Flames of Ferguson (December 2015)On Nov. 15 Jamar Clark was shot by Minneapolis police and died a day later. Many witnesses say he was handcuffed when shot. As we’ve seen in the past protesters immediately took to the streets using direct […]